Hi everyone, this is John Hagridorn and welcome to 1,001 Stories for the Road, also known

as Capping for the Curious and your home for good old-fashioned entertainment.

Twelve-year-old Anna Marie closed her Sunday school lesson book, quietly smiled up at her

mother, then clasped her hands together and lowered her head in reverence to the prayer

she knew was coming. After each lesson, Anne Jarvis would offer a prayer that best fit

the subject of that day's lesson. I hope and pray, her mother began, that someone,

sometime, will found a memorial day throughout the world to work together for peace.

It was a short prayer, but it was a subject Anna's mother was fond of discussing, and she

was well-known in Taylor County, West Virginia and beyond as an anti-war activist, doing

all she could to promote global unity and bring people together. After the horrors of

the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War in Europe, with millions of young men

dying, millions of mothers were grieving and passionately wanting the civilized world

to come to its senses. In the years prior to the Civil War in 1858, Anne Jarvis was

active in her community of Graffton, West Virginia by starting Mother's Day Work Clubs

to teach local women how to properly care for their children. These clubs later became

a unifying force in a region of the country still divided over the Civil War. And West

Virginia, unlike its neighbor Virginia, had sided with the Union, leaving many families

and communities divided, and that bitterness lasted far beyond the end of the war, which

had ended in the spring of 1865. If there was to be a glue that could bring people and

families together, Jarvis knew it would be the mothers who found their bonds in home,

family, and peace. In 1868 Jarvis organized Mother's Friendship Day,

at which mothers gathered with former Union and Confederate soldiers to promote reconciliation.

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